The Order of God: Renewing the Doctrine of God for Twenty-First-Century Christians

The Order of God

Renewing the Doctrine of God for the Twenty-First-Century Christians

Aaron Yom

The Order of God

Renewing the Doctrine of God for Twenty-First-Century Christians

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Table of Contents

Title Page

Preface

Abbreviations

Introduction

Chapter 1: Setting the Stage: From Nature’s Order to God’s Order

Chapter 2: The Prius of God’s Ontological Order

Chapter 3: God’s Order of Communication and Its Relationship to the Unthematic Dimension of Human Existence

Chapter 4: God’s Order of Pathos

Epilogue

Bibliography

I dedicate this book to Dr. Peter Gräbe.

Preface

I had planned to write a book on Christology, fleshing out the details of the God-man nature of Jesus Christ based on the principle of identity and duality. After working on the project for a few years, I realized that the principle of identity and duality stems from the doctrine of the Trinity, and I had no choice but to back paddle and revisit some of the methodological and pneumatological aspects of the doctrine of God. So, I ended up writing two books, one for the doctrine of the God and another Christology. The former is titled The Order of God and the latter God in Our Likeness. I am hoping to publish the second book shortly after this one.

I wrote this book to clarify and define the order of God such as God’s ontological order and his unthematic dimension of communication, as well as its cognate themes, such as the order of nature and the order of salvation. In doing so, I was hoping to recover the neglected order of God by critically examining old paradigms as well as new theological developments. The book builds on the earlier work of contemporary scholars such as Karl Barth, Thomas Torrance, Karl Rahner, David Coffey, Stanley Grenz, Jürgen Moltmann, and Clark Pinnock, as well as patristic and medieval scholars, like Augustine and Aquinas, but it takes the themes of systematic theology further, coordinating and refining previous conclusions, especially from a pneumatological perspective.

What I have in mind is a theological exposure to the dangers of arguing from the order of nature without understanding the proper order of God’s ontology as some of the interlocutors in this book have done. Thus, I have organized the book around the main thesis—i.e., there exists a unique form of God’s order that cannot simply be read off from the order of nature or the order of culture.

I hope that my theological analysis that unpacks God’s own logic, principles, and ontological status can help the readers and students navigate through the rough waters of contemporary theology. As I am reminded by Prof. Clark Pinnock, Christian theology is in a state of great confusion, and inadvertently, it has created a great labyrinthian maze that defies tracking. I pray that this book can be a useful theological roadmap for those bold travelers exploring the world of theology today.

Abbreviations

JAAR Journal of the American Academy of Religion

TS Theological Studies

PT Philosophy and Theology

JECS Journal of Early Christian Studies

IJST International Journal of Systematic Theology

SJT Scottish Journal of Theology

NZSTR Neue Zeitschrift für Systematische Theologie und Religionsphilosophie

PRS Perspectives in Religious Studies

AJTP American Journal of Theology and Philosophy

NIV New International Version

Introduction

This study is about the pursuit of God’s order. Searching for God’s order is not new. Christians have been searching for God’s order for centuries. One of the earliest attempts to define God’s order is the formulation of the trinitarian order of God. In the patristic period, much ink was spilled to outline the trinitarian relationship of God. How can the three distinct persons of the Godhead be one? Are three persons of the Godhead equal in power and authority? What is the precise order of the trinitarian relationship? The patristic writers were preoccupied with these questions and more like them. Although the Bible gave them the necessary language to speak about the trinitarian order like the baptismal formula (Matt 28:19) or the principle of Spirit baptism (Acts 2:32), early Christian writers had to rely on Hellenic philosophy to address these questions. The difficulty of unpacking God’s order could not have been accomplished by merely reading the biblical order about how the believers were baptized. They had to dig deeper into the realm of philosophy through which they could articulate the specifics of God’s order such as the order of his being and the order of his communication. Conveniently, these ideas of God’s order were already available through Platonic philosophy. So, the patristic writers such as Origen, Tertullian, the Cappadocian Fathers, and Augustine freely engaged different aspects of Platonism to unpack the true nature of God’s order.

As time progressed, the pursuit of God’s order became more and more rational and systematic. Perhaps this tendency is also of Hellenic thinking. In the ancient Greco-Roman world, the general tenor of philosophy is that the pattern of nature reveals the order of our own existence as well as God,¹ so that the attainment of order became the source of not only the life of well-being and intelligence, but also the understanding of the true nature of God. Christians gradually accepted this belief and began to organize their thoughts and actions in a systematic and well-ordered way, by which they could configure God’s order more clearly and distinctively. This is evident in the early part of the medieval period. For instance, the medieval Victorines, like Hugh of St. Victor, were drenched in the world of order and beauty.² They saw that the exterior life of nature had profound impact on the inner spiritual life that communes with God. Especially for Hugh of St. Victor, it was imperative to pursue all knowledge based on the life of spiritual discipline. Knowledge and spirituality could never be separated for him. Likewise, the emphasis on well-disciplined spiritual life coupled with rational illumination became the major theme of Christian scholars until the advent of modernism.

Modernism is normally associated with the Copernican Revolution. The Copernican Revolution signifies the discovery of a new center of our world. In ancient society, the center of the universe was Earth. However, with new scientific discoveries, the old Ptolemaic view of geocentricism was overthrown, and as a result, the heliocentric model of Copernicus took its place. We now know that the Earth is not the center of the universe, let alone our solar system. Similarly, an epistemological revolution gained full force at this time. Thanks to Kant, the order of being was supplanted by the order of the knower. This modern reconstructionism is often referred to as the Kantian Revolution.³ Kant’s contribution was huge in this regard, though he was not the only person to suggest that our knowledge depends on our own subjective grid. After Kant, a new center was located. It is none other than the subject that superseded the object. In the wake of modernism, nothing bypasses the subject. It is the subject that became the ordering center. With it came the responsibility to re-order not only ourselves but also God.

In the premodern era, the order that people saw in nature, or in themselves, was believed to be the reflection of God’s orderliness. In this view, all orders were accepted as given. They were the objects of faithful reception. This meant that Christians had to understand God before they could understand themselves, and for this reason, they continued to seek after God’s laws, principles, and logic. So, in the pre-modern period it is safe to say that they were God-dependent. However, the opposite is true for the modern period. In the modern world, rather than finding the center in God, people found the center in themselves. The old theocentric order was displaced and the new order of self-sufficient manhood took the center stage.⁴

In the self-sufficient world, the subject is the reigning champion. Whether we see the world through the well-ordered reason or the well-ordered feeling, the subject determines the rules and the rest of the categories in this world, including God, had to abide by its rules. Such a dramatic change indeed deserves to be called a revolution. It has brought an historic change in the way we view the world. The world is no longer dependent on God. Rather, the predominant idea of modernism is that the world operates based on its own inner purpose. It functions according to its own rules and regulations without the need for divine intervention. Consequently, the chief achievement of the Enlightenment is the severing of the laws of nature from the order of God. For instance, modern scholars like Baruch Spinoza and Pierre-Simon Laplace systematically attacked supernatural things and surgically removed them out of nature, and in their place, they erected a self-perpetuating cosmos so that the natural laws and phenomena could be described in terms of the natural processes alone.

Theology followed suit. Theology in the modern period began to lay the patterns of God not by what God has revealed himself to be but by the order we seem fit for God. Even if revelation was recognized as the primary data for theology, nonetheless it was at the mercy of the interpreter who had the right to judge the value and usefulness of God’s revelation. In many cases, in the court of biblical and theological interpreters, the central pillar of God’s revelation, such as Jesus’ resurrection, was dismissed or reinterpreted as a symbol for human existential situations.⁵ Systematically, God’s order was replaced by the order of nature and our own order of rationality. As a result, the miraculous and supernatural elements of theology gave way to the naturalistic and positivistic view of the world. This shift in theology eventually led to the point where God’s order became unrecognizable, for it has turned into the order of nature.⁶

In the postmodern world, the situation has not improved much. Even with the renewed effort to recover religious language and symbols of the past, the postmodern emphasis is on what God does for us rather than who God is in himself. It is God’s immanence that has become the locus of postmodern theology. The fallout from giving the privilege position to God’s immanence is that, once again, God is intermingled with the process of nature in such a way that God’s history is transformed into the history of nature or the history of culture. Even with the promotion of God’s transcendence, a way back to God himself is not guaranteed, for the concept of transcendence is often fleshed out from our own philosophical perspective.

In this context, the aim of this study is to recover and renew the order of God.⁷ This task cannot be accomplished simply by going back to the past and re-appropriating the theological contents of the premodern world. We have come too far. The pursuit of God’s order must be done critically examining new theological developments as well as old paradigms. Moreover, because the old and new theologies carry their own shortcomings, we simply cannot borrow the old for the sake of remodeling the new, and vice versa. We need to rigorously assess the viability of both the old and the new. For this purpose, I draw upon a holistic pneumatological vision of God. The pneumatological vision of God provides for this study its substance as well as presupposition, for it crosses the paths of the old and new theological programs without marginalizing one at the expense of the other. In so doing, I look for the lost pieces of God’s order so that God is clearly distinguished from the order of nature all the while locating the area of consonance between the two.

Consequently, I argue throughout the book that there exists a unique system of God’s order that cannot simply be read off from the order of nature, although we may rely on natural analogy to discern God’s order. To move beyond the postmodern impasse, I show that the proper understanding of God’s order must be worked out from the vantage point of God’s own logic, principles, and ontological status. My primary aim is to identify the key features of God’s own logic, principles, and ontological status in this book. For this task, I divide the book into four related chapters.

In the first chapter, I discuss the relationship between God’s order and the order of nature to set the stage for re-appropriating the order of God. Without seeing the asymmetrical relationship between God’s order and created order, we cannot take the next step in identifying the salient features of God’s order. Also, in this chapter, despite the difference between God’s order and nature’s order, contra Karl Barth, I point out the commensurability between the two systems, and based on this discussion, I provide the epistemic justification for reading God’s order from nature rationally and analogically.

I plunge into the heart of the matter in the second chapter and fully unpack God’s ontological order. In fact, I argue for the prius of God’s ontological order. My intention here is to show that God’s order moves from God’s ontology to God’s economy-for-us though our knowledge of God is reliant upon God’s revealed economy in this world. In this way, we can clearly identify God’s addenda—e.g., the things that he has taken upon himself in his mingling with us, which do not belong to God himself intrinsically.

In the third chapter, I analyze God’s order of communication to apply what we have discussed thus far. Based on my critical analysis of David Coffey, Karl Rahner, and Stanley Grenz, I come up with my own view of God’s order of self-communication. I name it a dual core theory. This theory recognizes God’s order of communication that starts from the unthematic dimension of our being to the conscious action that cooperates with God. It also highlights God’s unthematic communication that involves God’s offer of grace that counters our sinful nature.

In the final chapter, I tie the loose ends and drive home my point, highlighting the importance of reading God’s order on its own terms as I discuss the order of God’s pathos. Here, I unveil the errors of reading indiscriminately God’s order from God’s involvement with the world. My goal in this chapter is to rethink the order of God’s pathos and claim that we can preserve God’s own logic, and at the same time, talk about God’s pain and suffering for us. For this reason, I counter Jürgen Moltmann and Clark Pinnock, arguing that they have dismissed God’s ontological order for the sake of keeping God’s order of passibility.

1. Jaegar, Padeia, xiii–xxviii.

2. Coolman, Hugh of St. Victor,

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3. Berry, The Kantian Revolution,

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4. My assessment of modernism follows the work of Stanley Grenz and Roger Olson. According to Grenz and Olson, although pre-modernism or modernism is a complex intellectual movement that eludes any sweeping generalization, from a theological perspective, we can conclude that there was a shift from the theocentric focus to the anthropocentric emphasis. For more details, see Grenz and Olson,

20

th-Century Theology,

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5. Rudolph Bultmann’s work is a good example. See Bultmann, New Testament and Mythology,

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6. Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise,

81

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96

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7. I acknowledge some pioneering works in this field of study, though their focus is different than mine. Keith Ward’s The Christian Idea of God, Vern S. Poythress’ Logic: A God-Centered Approach to the Foundation of Western Thought, Alister E. McGrath’s The Order of Things, Stephen T. Davis’ Logic and the Nature of God, Ronald H. Nash’s The Concept of God, and lastly but most importantly, Thomas F. Torrance’s Divine and Contingent Order.

Chapter 1

Setting the Stage: From Nature’s Order to God’s Order

Can we discern God’s order from nature? If so, how should we approach God’s order from nature? Should we adopt a formalist, realist, historical, or transcendental approach? These are the questions I will be addressing in this chapter. My claim is that nature as God’s creation reveals the order of God though analogically and implicitly. So, for me, the starting point of the theological discussion of God’s order must begin with nature. This does not mean that I am arguing for a Spinozian uniformity principle of order. Spinoza equated the immutable laws of nature to God’s immutable order of his being.⁸ For him, God’s order was nature’s order, and vice versa. This is an explicit endorsement of pantheism. We cannot commit the same error by confusing nature’s order and God’s order as a non-divided whole. What we need to understand is that nature’s order is not God’s order.

Likewise, we cannot run the same scenario of reducing God’s order to nature’s order, like Ernst Troeltsch’s principle of analogy.⁹ Troeltsch had argued for the homogeneity of history, and with this principle, he demonstrated that there is no such thing as supernatural causality. His argument goes like this: because the miracle of resurrection is not taking place today, it did not take place in the past. Troeltsch’s claim is based on naturalistic history, in which the mechanism of nature is the measuring rod for all other events in history, including divine history. So, like many naturalistic scholars, he simply dismissed the order of God’s miracle.

As a corrective to these approaches, and at the same time, to find a way to God from nature without undervaluing God’s ontological order, I demonstrate in this chapter that God’s order in nature is distinguishable and yet consonant with nature’s order. To accomplish this task, I begin with the discussion of natural theology, or more specifically, with a question, is natural theology possible? Karl Barth did not think so, and I disagree with him, though I understand why natural theology can be deleterious to Christianity. So, I critically review Barth’s disclaim of natural theology and argue that, to a certain extent, natural analogues can be functionally useful to point out God’s order from nature. In fact, I show that natural theology is the basic building block for discerning God’s order for us, which is a necessary ingredient for discerning God’s order in himself. I also claim that natural order is the propitious ground upon which God’s order of salvation is manifested.

What follows then is a three-step presentation. The first part deals with Barth’s dismissal of natural theology. I highlight his key arguments against natural theology. Based on the first analysis, the second part concentrates on the shortcomings of Barth’s arguments. Here, I try to show that Barth’s view of nature is too narrow and misleading. Lastly, I present my own view of the principle of analogy that cautiously acknowledges nature’s order as a viable option for conceptualizing God’s order for us.

Is Natural Theology Possible?

As I have said before, to discuss about the possibility of natural theology, we need to dialogue with Barth, who has put forth a unique argument against natural theology. My interaction with Barth identifies the key features of natural theology, and at the same time, its shortcomings so that I can clarify the usefulness of natural theology in unveiling God’s order. Of course, I do not accept Barth’s strong denial of natural theology wholeheartedly, but nonetheless, I take his criticism seriously, for we have been reading too much of nature into God. Like Barth, I see this trend to be the greatest ill of modern theology. As a way to correct modern theological deficiencies, I turn to Barth’s celebrated criticism against natural theology.

Barth’s Misapprehensions

Barth’s theological scope is wide and broad. In addition, his theology is known to invoke controversy and dispute, which are too numerous to number. For this reason, Barth’s analysis on natural theology is kept within a specific premise here, relying on primarily selected writings from Church Dogmatics, where he provides workable data for us to think about the ontological order of God. This analysis for sure is not the last word describing what Barth was trying to say about natural theology, but nonetheless, it is an honest attempt to clarify and take advantage of Barth’s work, all the while critically engaging his thought from a pneumatological perspective.

Reading Barth’s Church Dogmatics, we can undoubtedly encounter his persistent argument against natural theology. In almost every corner of his theological presentation, the voice against natural theology is easily heard. Actually, it balances well with his christocentric paradigm. While the christocentric vision takes the central spot as the positive development of his theology, an attempt to defy all forms of natural theology is equally forceful as a negative form of his theology. So, Barth’s Christology as the positive reinforcement of Christian theology is balanced with the negative side of his theology, namely, his aversion toward natural theology. In this respect, although Barth’s negation of natural theology has been reviewed from many different perspectives, I prefer to work with a comparative approach, playing it off against Barth’s Christology. What better way is there than to compare two extreme poles of Barth’s theology? Let me begin with a christological analysis.

As Marc Cortez notes, Barth is rightfully called a christocentric theologian.¹⁰ If we compare Barth’s theology to a wheel, Jesus Christ is the hub and the remaining theological categories are the spokes that are attached to it. Even if we say that Barth’s chief theological category is revelation, it too is driven by Christology, for he believes that God reveals himself in and through Jesus Christ. In my judgment, this is a telltale sign that Barth has fallen into a theological particularism. For Barth, Jesus Christ differentiates us from the rest. Jesus Christ makes us unique. It is where we find our theological niche. We cannot blame Barth for taking this stance, since the Bible itself attests to the particularity of Christian faith. John 14:6 specifically denotes that Jesus is the way and the truth and the life, and no one comes to the Father except through [him]. All is good, but Barth has taken this particularism to its limit and created a theological expanse that is excessively